The light is lurking somewhere in the moment. Somewhere in the distance and beyond practical solutions and rational discourse is the home of the insufferable and indistinguishable light of consciousness.

Heroes come in many forms, though rarely among the wretched, the weary and the disgusting souls from beggar roots in Calcutta and Lima and Sao Paulo and Los Angeles.

Living in misery, squalor and filth; wholly disenfranchised from the universal perceptions of sustainability, the heroes are but of millions in a vast wasteland of the human capital left behind to rot in the pits of our own disregard.

Such is the lot of the human race. Such is the lot of our collective psyche.

If all life is indeed suffering and ending desire obliterates suffering, then what of the archetypes of our own construct that are inherent in humanity?

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The inward journey is one that could never be fully explained, summarized or rationalized in words. My inward journey of ten years ago was one of the hero manifested within my own self-loathing and hatred. Becoming the hero in a dreamscape of fantasy and paranoia led to more distress and years trying to find a semblance of peace.

Through that journey inward there temporarily was a place of enlightenment and refuge; a fleeting glimpse of beauty and self-actualization: the meaning of life itself. Confusion would ultimately reign supreme however, as the complexities of delusions and a world surrounding me not experiencing the same construct to be projected out of my own mind would further alienate my own heroes journey of neurotransmitted reverie.

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A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men….

…The assaults, actually, are from within, but he projects them outward, imagining that the world is everywhere on watch against him… ‘unable to comprehend or tolerate the stark. terrors of his inner world, prematurely directs his attention to the outside world. In this type of abortive crisis solution, the inner chaos is not, so to speak, worked through, or is not capable of being worked through.’ The lunatic victim is at large, so to say, in the field of his own projected unconscious… (Campbell)

I sought meaning, be it real or imagined, from a life a confusion and inner turmoil, thus is the lot of all of us. Humanity seeks the same understandings and conceptualizations to escape the constraints of the human condition. Through our dichotomies of good and evil; right and wrong, we build a construct of consciousness ripe for the heroes journey.

The psychologist who has best dealt with these, best described and best interpreted them, isCarl G. Jung, who terms them ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious,’ as pertaining to those structures of the psyche that are not the products of merely individual experience but are common to all mankind. In his view, the basal depth or layer of the psyche is an expression of the instinct system of our species, grounded in the human body, its nervous system and wonderful brain. All animals act instinctively…

…And so man too is governed and determined. He has both an inherited biology and a personal biography, the “archetypes of the unconscious” being expressions of the first. The repressed personal memories, on the other hand, of the shocks, frustrations, fears, etc., of infancy, to which the Freudian school gives such attention, Jung distinguishes from that other and calls the “personal unconscious.” As the first is biological and common to the species, so this second is biographical, socially determined, and specific to each separate life… (Campbell)

The condition known as ‘human’ is but one of the same though wholly separate and of esoteric construct given our own perceptions of life and the experiences and insights that have shaped those perceptions.

So why is it then, that humans, of the same archetypes of the collective unconscious, are so cold, harsh and able to exacerbate their own alienation and conscious extinction? Within the state of disassociation, I perceived universal absoluteness, though that was merely a vanishing construct as fear and hopelessness would set in.

The first [function of a living mythology] is what I have called the mystical function: to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe, not so that he lives in fear of it, but so that he recognizes that he participates in it, since the mystery of being is the mystery of his own deep being as well…

…The second function of a living mythology is to offer an image of the universe that will be in accord with the knowledge of the time, the sciences and the fields of action of the folk to whom the mythology is addressed. In our own day, of course, the world pictures of all the major religions are at least two thousand years out of date, and in that act alone there is ground enough for a very serious break-off…

…The third function of a living mythology is to validate, support, and imprint the norms of a given, specific moral order, that, namely, of the society in which the individual is to live. And the fourth is to guide him, stage by stage, in health, strength, and harmony of spirit, through the whole foreseeable course of a useful life. (Campbell)

All life is but mythical in nature. Wandering through conscious and subconscious states always seeking the journey of the hero. Our unique journey, our heroes journey, is sometimes never ventured upon. It is sometimes ventured within the mundane tasks of everyday existence. It is sometimes ventured with a force so great as to separate us from the very constructs of consciousness that are necessary to function within the contexts of our time and place.

To say I took a heroes journey would be but a statement of romantic whimsy. The journey I took was at once exhilarating and freeing while ultimately a destructive course of venturing deeper within a state of self-delusion and disillusion; one of ostentatious self identifying grandeur — one that is enough for this one lifetime of mine.

The trick must be to become aware of it without becoming lost in it: to understand that we may all be saviors when functioning in relation to our friends or enemies: savior figures, but never The Savior. We may all be mothers and fathers, but are never The Mother, The Father. (Campbell)